In 2020 I did a writing challenge to write a short story every day for a month. At the time, I had very recently come out as nonbinary and I was maybe a month or so into a relationship with a straight, hetero man. It was an odd and tricky time for me, but doing that writing challenge was a nice escape to just focus on something else for a while. It seemed perfectly innocent!
And then one day my partner asked me what the day’s story was about and I had to answer, “It’s about a guy who finds himself suddenly and secretly transformed into a new kind of being that makes him altogether different, but still very much himself and his partner doesn’t understand and tries to kill him.”
It was a real ‘well when you put it that way’ to myself. We broke up about a month later.
This was not the first time I realized I was using fiction as a tool to process. It is fascinating how my mind feels so much like a living doll house. I’ll take a character out or craft a new one to play on some new scenario, thinking I’m doing something interesting and original and then either I turn to share it with someone or just think more than two seconds and go, “Oh…huh…I’m really going through something, aren’t I?”
Three times in a month I started a new mini writing project: a wizard who’d left his magical order to become a music producer, a young man befriending the monster attached to him in spite of his family’s instructions, and a seemingly benevolent werewolf running a carnival using the people’s trust in him to cover up secrets. I got to a certain point in all of them and had to go, “This is about religious trauma, isn’t it?”
I’ve had to explain in-depth a plot of a very strange story I was playing with to my therapist just to have her turn it around me with the kind of laser precision the military would pay obscene amounts of money for. I don’t know what it is, it’s just easier to process things in fiction.
But honestly, putting things in fiction isn’t a bad way to process. It’s a perfect arena to battle with those kinds of ideas in a way that’s safe and honestly can be pretty fun. Sometimes it’s nice to give a face to something frustrating just to have a target to pin things on—or in the opposite direction, give it a face and a name to think about it in a different way. No one gets hurt (except maybe the feelings of the documents that never get finished) and I get to put something rattling around in my brain away, even if just for a moment.
Of course, this kind of thing isn’t just for dealing with problems. Sometimes it’s just me putting parts of myself elsewhere. I was telling a friend about these two characters I had, a pair of brothers who’d lost everything when they were little, including each other for a time. The older had become a successful business man to be responsible and able to provide. The younger had run away and become a magician, traveling the country with circuses and busking on corners. In their story, they reunite with distant family they never knew they had and tell the story of how their parents met. The younger is embellishing with romantic sweeps while the oldest keeps correcting him, interrupting his fantasy with facts.
My friend stopped me and went, “They sound like you, that romantic side of you versus the reasonable and logical side.” I had never thought of those characters in that way. For a moment I was worried that in thinking about them in that way they would feel more fake to me, like shining a light on the puppet’s strings. But to my surprise, it didn’t. If anything it made them more real. I knew exactly how they felt, each of them in their different directions. I could see myself elaborating the sweet dramatics of a perfect love story with the younger brother just as easily as I could roll my eyes at him with the older. They’re both a part of me and I absolutely love them for who they are.
The more I’ve recognized this in myself, the quicker I’ve become to pick up on things about myself. When I find myself playing a lot with a character who likes to crack jokes to cover up the problems they’re dealing with, I try and take a moment to be real. When I’m thinking a lot about my character who lives on the road with no real roots, I reach out and connect to someone I love. When I’m spending a lot of time with a character who stays in his woods and his cabin, afraid of what’s beyond his boundary line, I try to do something new even if it’s kind of scary. It’s like they’re a temperature gauge, but for my sanity, and if a temperature gauge came with a surprising amount of lore.
Obviously not everything I write is going to be linked to some deep repressed something in me, but things I make reflect me, whether I try to or not. Some of them have parts of me I’m not fond of, but I still have to appreciate them and their place in the narrative. After all, if I can’t do that for them, how’s anyone supposed to do that for me?
Sam is unsure what exact words describe them best: Lunatic has been used, Gothic Romantic is apt, and Big ol’ Nerd is reductive but true. Mostly they just like stories in whatever form stories can be found. Sam specializes in Frankenstein, running “The Uncanny Productions” on YouTube, but they also dabble with podcasts, singing, and theatre as well. They have a DVD collection that’s long outgrown its shelf, a coffin they use as a desk, and an unrelenting joy for things that are spooky, ridiculous, or magical.
